Or in Other Words: How to Prevent Your Steem Power from Being Abused

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It's not a secret that the reward pool for authors and curators is abused. That means some authors and curators receive more than their fair share.

The rewards paid to the authors and curators in a year amount to $65 Million USD. That might give you an idea of the scale of the abuse.

I argue by no means that every author and curator on Steemit is an abuser. Certainly, not. During my first ten days on Steemit, I came across great people and great posts. I learned a lot from those people and their posts. Yet, this doesn't change the fact that there is reward pool abuse.

You might argue that there is abuse everywhere; why bother. The problem is the whole Steemit ecosystem could collapse as a result of this abuse. That would be a pity, because this platform has such a great potential.

There are some changes that can be done at the policy level and we have already started to discuss the implications of such changes in a previous post. I plan to write an update to that post taking into account all the feedback I received.

What You Can Do as an Individual Against the Reward Pool Abuse?

There's something each of us can do against the reward pool abuse as individuals. We don't need to wait for a policy change. We can't prevent the Steem Power of others from being abused, but we can prevent our own Steem Power from being abused. Here's how to do that.

The formula is really simple. All you have to do is to log in to the system and cast 10 votes every day. Or try to average 10 votes a day each five day period. @biophil has done a great job of explaining why a minimum of 10 votes every day maximizes your influence on Steemit in his Ultimate Guide to Voting Power post.

In other words, you don't want your Voting Power to get to 100% and stay there. If that happens, the extra voting power you are supposed to receive is passed on to others and partially to abusers.

How can you check your Voting Power?

Just visit steemd.com/@your_username. My steemd.com screenshot is below and yes, it shows 100%. Shame on me for not having cast my votes in the last 24 hours. Don't worry about your voting power going lower. It will be refilled by 20% every 24 hours.

You don't want this band to reach 100% and stay there!

I don't have the time to read ten posts to upvote them every day.

If that's your excuse, I get you. I have that problem too and today, I came up with a solution. I made a pool of users that I think they add great value to the platform. I simply visit their blog and upvote some of their posts published within the last seven days.

You might ask why only the posts published within the last seven days. The reason for that is that posts older than seven days stop receiving any rewards anymore in the current version. You can check @seanlloyd's post for more information on that.

You might find this method less than perfect and yes, it is less than perfect. But if you take into account all the abuse that happens on this platform, this is the best solution that I found that I could use as an individual right away.

If we don't do this, those rewards will end up in the bank accounts of people that don't deserve these rewards at all. The people that we upvote at least contribute to the platform and they deserve these rewards.

I've Got Rules!

Having said that, I'm not so loose with my rewarding. I check whether these people and their posts seem to be boosted with bots. I skip such people or posts.

You might also think, why not self-vote all of those ten votes. I don't think that's such a great idea. Sure, I have voted my own comments in the past, but now that I'm thinking about it, it doesn't seem moral to self-vote my own comments.

Self-voting my posts is another issue, because I make some effort for my posts and I believe they deserve at least my own vote, but who knows, I may quit doing that as well, because, frankly I don't feel too good about it.

Another issue is self-voting a comment in a very noisy thread to get some attention. That's a gray area. Yes, it doesn't feel great, but I wouldn't judge someone who does it, if they have something important to say.

Needless to say, you can abuse the system by publishing a junk post, adding nine junk comments to it, upvoting all of them, and repeating that every day. Unfortunately, doing that is possible in the current system and if other users catch up to what you are doing, your account and posts might receive a lot of flags. Even without all of those flags, it's just immoral to do that.

By the way, if you don't have the time to cast ten votes a day consider delegating your Steem Power to someone who can and someone who would use that Steem Power for the benefit of the whole Steemit ecosystem.

Stay in Touch

That's it for this post and let me know what you think about this issue and this solution. Also, stay in touch for the updated version of the How to Solve the Reward Pool Abuse Problem Once and For All post.